Louis Riel

Louis Riel (22 October 1844-16 November 1885) was a Canadian politician and a Metis political leader who was one of the founders of the province of Manitoba. Riel led two rebellions against the Canadian government, and he was executed after he was captured.

Biography
Louis Riel was born in Red River Colony, Rupert's Land, Canada on 22 October 1844, the eldest of eleven children born to a Franco-Ojibwe father and a white mother. Riel originally intended to become a priest, but he abandoned these aspirations after his father's death in 1865 and lived in Chicago, Illinois in the United States while working odd jobs and writing poetry. He later returned to Canada to find that the Metis people of Rupert's Land were being threatened by the migration of white settlers from Ontario as the result of the Canadian government's purchase of the colony from the Hudson's Bay Company, and he spoke out against the encroachments. Riel and the metis created a provisional government, inviting an equal number of Anglophone Canadian representatives and French-speaking metis representatives. Riel successfully negotiated the formation of the province of Manitoba, and he also secured rights for Catholics in Rupert's Land and Francophone education for the Métis people. In 1870, however, the Canadian Army was dispatched to occupy Manitoba after the Métis arrested and executed a man plotting to murder Riel, and Riel fled to the USA. While a fugitive in Montana, he was elected three times to the House of Commons of Canada, but he gradually lost the support of the Catholic clergy as he grew to see himself as a divinely chosen leader and prophet. In 1884, the Métis of Saskatchewan called on Riel to state their grievances to the Canadian government, but he instead led military resistance to the Canadian government in the North-West Rebellion. The Canadian government in Ottawa used new rail lines to send in thousands of soldiers to crush the uprising, and Riel was arrested and convicted of high treason. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had him executed by hanging at a military barracks in Regina, Northwest Territories on 16 November 1885. His death alienated Francophone Canadians, and his proponents saw him as a heroic rebel who fought for multiculturalism, while his opponents saw him as a half-insane religious fanatic and nationalist.